accounting

Dan Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, thinks that banks are under-reserving and that this will come back to haunt them when house prices fall in "the final leg down" of the housing crisis.  That is the right view…

John Hussman has a piece out today that dissects the current economic environment in two parts. In part one, Hussman puts a spotlight on quantitative easing (QE) and why it is unlikely to have the intentioned effect on the U.S. economy. And…

by Annaly Capital Management Lest anyone think we missed it, on August 31st the FDIC put out its Quarterly Banking Profile for the second quarter of 2010. The headline was glowing: “Quarterly Earnings Are Highest in Almost Three Years.”…

This week the following graph from https://www.chartoftheday.com https://www.chartoftheday.com/ has been annotated by the author to highlight similarities of the current era for stocks to a corporate earnings pattern traced out nearly a…

In a recent post on the money multiplier, a reader Luis Enrique asked about bank lending and capital constraints. Anecdotally, much of the reduction in credit is supply-constrained as well as demand-constrained. That means it's a matter of…

The market is engaged in a discussion over what the Federal Reserve will do next. St. Louis Fed president James Bullard published a provocative paper about ratcheting up quantitative easing to avoid the Japanese dilemma. Conversely, Philly…

From Annaly Capital Management For those who missed it (and we had, until we were tipped by James Aitken, thank you very much), a vital paper was posted to the New York Fed’s website in the beginning of the month. “Shadow Banking,” a staff…

Below is a very entertaining interview with Howard Davidowitz on financial reform and the credit crisis with Aaron Task and Henry Blodget of Tech Ticker (hat tip Scott). Davidowitz says don't expect any substantive changes, especially…

We know that JPMorgan is not substantially increasing lending anytime soon. And we also know that banks are recapitalizing courtesy of a steep yield curve and near zero rates, what I would call free money.  What I didn't know is how…

Vicky Ward, author of "The Devil's Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers," told Bloomberg that prosecutors need to get going if we are going to get any answers regarding why Lehman…